Sen. Lucia Guzman of Denver and Sen.-elect Kerry Donovan of Vail at the Colorado Senate Democratic caucus election in 2014. The caucus will meet again next week at the state Capitol to elect Guzman as minority leader. (Lynn Bartels, The Denver Post)

Denver Sen. Lucia Guzman will become the head of the Democratic caucus when it meets next week to elect a new minority leader to replace Sen. Morgan Carroll.

Carroll is stepping down as minority leader — but staying on as a senator — after announcing Tuesday she is running for Congress in the 6th District in an attempt to unseat Republican Mike Coffman of Aurora. Carroll is expected to announce sometime today that she is going to resign as minority leader effective next week.

State Sen. Morgan Carroll is all smiles in 2014 after Gov. John Hickenlooper signed legislation authorizing nearly $20 million to expand the state’s firefighting fleet. (Photo by John Leyba/The Denver Post)

Republicans are going to try to paint Democratic Sen. Morgan Carroll as some sort of liberal wack-a-doodle now that she is challenging Aurora Congressman Mike Coffman, but her legislative record offers some surprises.

In 2006, when Carroll represented Aurora in the state House, she gave an impassioned speech against a bill that would allow police to pull over drivers solely for failing to buckle up.

Aurora Congressman Mike Coffman paid Republican Ben Carson $15,000 to speak at a fundraiser, according to a Wall Street Journal story reporting that the GOP presidential candidate and his wife earned between $8.9 million and $27 million in a recent 16-month period.

Now that Coffman has announced he won’t run for the U.S. Senate but will again seek re-election in the 6th District, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee immediately went to work to highlight Thursday’s WSJ piece. The group works to elect Democrats to Congress and is itching to unseat Coffman. Democrats thought that they had redrawn the seat after the 2010 census to make it competitive enough to kick out the Republican but Coffman has moderated his views on immigration reform and other issues.

The DCCC says the speech is another reason to be skeptical of the shift.

“After years of running to the right, embracing the birther movement and paying the extremely controversial Ben Carson thousands of dollars, Mike Coffman has been attempting a fake moderate rebrand to keep his seat. Voters will see right through that,” said Tyler Law, press secretary for the Mountain West Region of the DCCC.

Responded Coffman spokesman Tyler Sandberg: “They said that all last cycle and their No. 1 recruit in the country got steamrolled by 9 points.”

Tonight’s congressional debate between former House Speaker Andrew Romanoff and U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman in one of the most closely watched U.S. House races in the country should bring an hour of political theater.

Here are five things to watch for in the Congressional District 6 debate, which is sponsored by The Denver Post and begins at 6 p.m. It will be live streamed at www.denverpost.com/debates (link will be active later today).

2. Which will happen first: Coffman reminding the audience that he’s a veteran (drink!) or Romanoff telling viewers his mother is a Democrat and his father is a Republican?

3. Will the candidates’ views on immigration get beyond Romanoff’s role in the 2006 special session and Coffman’s former admiration of immigration firebrand Tom Tancredo?

4. Will Coffman be on the defensive over his past support for Colorado personhood measures and other arguments from the Democrats’ “war on women” playbook?

5. How many times will Coffman bring up Romanoff’s aggressively negative campaign against Sen. Michael Bennet in the 2010 Democratic primary? Related: Can Romanoff explain why Bennet recently deleted the ad where he calls the speaker “sleazy” and why did it take four years?

Bill Maher, ‘liberal political satirist, host of “Real Time with Bill Maher.” (Photo by Sam Jones)

Those zany liberals at ProgressNow Colorado have come up with 11 reasons why Bill Maher should choose Colorado’s 6th Congressional District as a district to flip and kick out the incumbent, Republican Rep. Mike Coffman.

House Speaker John Boehner will campaign in Denver Tuesday for U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Aurora. (Pete Marovich/Bloomberg )

House Speaker John Boehner is coming to Denver Tuesday to campaign for one the GOP’s most endangered members, Rep. Mike Coffman of Aurora.

Coffman faces a challenge from former House Speaker Andrew Romanoff in one of the most competitively drawn seats in the country. Tickets for the fundraiser at the Brown Palace range from $2,500 to $250.

This election cycle, Coffman is the only GOP incumbent defending a House seat that could go either way, according to top political pundits such as Charlie Cook and Stuart Rothenberg.

And the race is considered important because it has implications for 2016, which is why the GOP is pouring money into the 6th Congressional District.

A deluge of campaign cash continues to flow into the 6th Congressional District contest as Democratic challenger Andrew Romanoff this week announced his campaign raked in about $842,500 in second-quarter fundraising.

Romanoff’s total outpaced incumbent GOP Congressman Mike Coffman, who raised about $742,000. And with less than four months until Election Day, Romanoff has about $2.6 million in the bank, while Coffman is at about $2.3 million.

Tuesday was the deadline for federal candidates to file fundraising reports for expenses and donations that span a reporting period from April through June.

“Coloradans are sending a clear message to Congress,” Romanoff said in a statement. “Stand up to the special interests. Strengthen the middle class. Put our families first.”

With the June 24 primary dividing the second-quarter report into pre-and-post primary totals, Coffman’s campaign on Tuesday claimed a small victory in that it outpaced Romanoff’s campaign by about $28,000 in post primary fundraising totals.

“VIP access to the Obama-Pelosi money factory has been enough to give Romanoff a narrow fundraising advantage over Mike the last couple periods,” Tyler Sandberg, Coffman’s campaign manager, said in a statement. “We’re big boys and girls over at Team Coffman. We can admit it. But Marines don’t take ‘no’ for an answer, and Mike Coffman is surging past Romanoff in money and momentum.”

Incumbents usually enjoy fundraising advantages, but not so much in the highly competitive 6th Congressional District, where Democrat Andrew Romanoff continues to outpace incumbent Republican Congressman Mike Coffman.

In pre-primary fundraising reports unveiled Thursday, Romanoff raised about $465,000 from April 1 until June 4, while Coffman brought in about $336,600.

Romanoff, a former speaker of the Colorado House, who has shunned taking money from PACs, now has about $2.3 million in the bank compared to Coffman’s $1.96 million.

In the first fundraising quarter of this year Romanoff raised $603,000 — about $10,000 more than Coffman. Romanoff also raised more than Coffman in the final fundraising quarter of last year.

With the race viewed widely as a pure tossup, already nearly $600,000 from third party groups has flowed into the contest.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce for several weeks recently ran a TV ad in support of Coffman.

Andrew Romanoff meets with volunteers over the weekend. (Courtesy of Romanoff campaign)

Democrat Andrew Romanoff over the weekend kicked off a canvassing campaign in his quest to capture Colorado’s 6th Congressional District this November.

Romanoff, a former Colorado House Speaker, is vying to unseat GOP Rep. Mike Coffman in the Aurora-based 6th District — a seat that is among the most competitive in the country as it’s divided almost evenly among Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters.

“Our grassroots team made about 1,000 phone calls and knocked on 2,000 doors. With five months until Election Day, Andrew and his volunteers are listening to voters and sharing ideas to grow the economy and strengthen the middle class,” Denise Baron, Romanoff’s spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.

With issues such as immigration reform, raising the federal minimum wage, renewable energy and aid for military veterans likely to dominate the campaign in this suburban Denver district, many political observers believe the race will be decided based purely on turnout in this off election year.

With President Barack Obama on the top of the ticket in 2012 and carrying the district by 5 percentage points, Coffman, who is vying for a fourth-term, was able to still win re-election to his seat by about 2 percentage points.

U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman is in the battle of his political career this November where every vote matters but one vote he won’t receive — at least as of now — comes from one of his staunchest allies: his wife Cynthia Coffman.

Cynthia Coffman, the state’s chief deputy attorney general who is the GOP nominee for attorney general, isn’t a registered voter in the Aurora-based 6th Congressional District her husband represents. Instead, she’s a registered voter in the Denver-based 1st Congressional District.

Cynthia Coffman has been a registered voter in Denver since 2011. In 2012, she didn’t cast a vote for her husband, who won re-election to his competitive seat that year by about 2 percentage points.

So why not register in the competitive 6th District?

“Cynthia and Mike owned their own homes before they were married,” said Sarah Lenti, a spokeswoman for the attorney general campaign. “Mike works in Washington, D.C., but for the weekends, and Cynthia lives and works in Denver as chief deputy attorney general.”

Lenti added that Cynthia Coffman lives in the home “closest to her work.”

Rep. Coffman is vying for a fourth-term in the 6th District and is being challenged by Democrat Andrew Romnanoff, a former Colorado House speaker.

His campaign did not respond to requests for comment about his wife’s voter registration.

Joey Bunch has been a reporter for 28 years, including the last 12 at The Denver Post. For various newspapers he has covered the environment, water issues, politics, civil rights, sports and the casino industry.